Vidal Lormendez, a Community Health Worker and the Migrant Services Specialist at NC FIELD. Vidal regularly helps design, test, and implement projects alongside our agricultural workforce across 41 eastern North Carolina counties. He reports back on the NCEJN-NC Field Research Readiness Workshop that occured on March 6th of this year.
I attended the first workshop around developing an action research agenda that was hosted at NC FIELD’s Wayne County office by the UNC Environmental Justice Clinic and facilitated by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network.
It gave me a chance to learn and reflect on how research is often done in communities like ours.
As a former migrant farmworker, now trained and working as a Community Health Worker, I’ve seen firsthand how research projects usually happen in migrant labor camps. People we may or may not know arrive with their own surveys and timelines, asking us to participate after long days in the fields, often before we’ve even had a chance to eat. They ask for our time, our stories, and our trust. What they rarely ask for is our input before the project begins. It is not a partnership. It’s a favor. And favors don’t change systems. They don’t prevent injuries. They don’t save lives.
What stood out to me during the workshop is that research has power. It can be used to inform policy, influence programs, and shape the way people think about farmworker communities. But when it’s designed without us, it often misses the mark.
It becomes something that benefits researchers, not the workers. If farmworkers had been at the table from the beginning, we could have helped shape the questions and the goals. The data collected could be used to advocate for safer working conditions and better protections during extreme heat, which is a serious threat in eastern North Carolina. Instead, we’re asked to help after the decisions are already made. The questions often don’t have a clear goal that is relevant to us. For example, you can develop a survey around heat exposure from the perspective of a researcher, and you may even pilot the survey among a few different camps. But did you know that working in tobacco and working in cucumber present different dangers when it comes to heat? Do you understand the differences between working for a labor contractor who uses a subcontractor to transport you to a field and a farmer who is within a few miles of where the work is happening?
I’m proud that NC FIELD and other rural groups made space to attend this first training. It is helping us build the tools to evaluate research projects and decide which ones truly serve our communities. We don’t need to keep participating in research that doesn’t happen with us in mind. Our experiences, our ideas, and our leadership matter. That’s why this work has to be rooted in our communities. From the ground up. Nothing about us, without us.
